... the companies which you absolutely have to
look at if you've got any new projects involving SSDs? There are nearly 400
companies actively designing and marketing SSD products and systems today.
This list ranks companies based on the quarterly search volume of over 1.2
million annual SSD readers here on StorageSearch.com

Strictly
speaking 80% of the reader interest in LSI/SandForce in this period was related
to the SandForce controller part of the company. LSI itself would have been
ranked #20 in its own right based on reader interest in its PCIe SSDs and
software. Adding the LSI searches to the SandForce searches - didn't make any
difference to the #3 rank in this period.

In this
quarter - STEC continued to frustrate and astonish investors and analysts by
reporting
38% year on year decline from the year ago quarter - at a time when
the enterprise SSD market appeared to be in stampede growth mode.

I
said to one (of many) such SSD investment analysts who sounded me out on STEC's
business performance - "I've been talking regularly to STEC about the
SSD market for about 8 years. So my frustrations in what they have'nt done and
lost opportunities are bigger than those of any investors. (Despite that)...I
think STEC could still get much higher multiples of its current revenues than
it has achieved in recent quarters but it needs better marketing to do this."

If
you look back at past editions of this top SSD companies list (links at the
bottom of this page) you'll see that STEC's cargo cult belief that future
enterprise SSD business would always come in the next batch of oem customer
POs - has been a commonly recurring theme.

Up 1 place since the last quarter.
This is OCZ's highest ranking in the history of these lists.

In this
quarter - OCZ announced
imminent shipments of new high capacity PCIe SSDs optimized for cloud apps.
The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full
height card and is supported by auto-caching SSD ASAP fuctionality.

In
this quarter - TMS - which has for more than a decade positioned itself as the
company which designs the "world's fastest storage" - introduced a "fast-enough" PCIe
SSD - called the RamSan-80
as part of an SSD ASAP bundle which included software from NEVEX.

Rather
than being seen as a change in direction - the launch fitted into an emerging
pattern from TMS in the past year - which seems to be - that if they can adapt
their enterprise SSD IP to suit a distinct segment of user needs - by offering
a different set of optimized features (not just speed - but also other
dimensions like storage density and resilience) then they're willing to do it.

In
this quarter - Virident published a bunch of articles and reports which
describe
and
validate
important design aspects of its enterprise SSDs which are commensurate
ingredients in its marketing goal to - "deliver predictable,
industry-leading SSD performance which scales across diverse workloads, data
sets, and sustains over time."

There are 11
core SSD architecture symmetries which are required to build the perfect
enterprise SSD. No designs in the market today are anywhere near perfect. The
best SSD designers currently struggle to achieve high scores in as many as
4 of these.

StorageSearch.com is proud to
pre-announce the probable future winners in the solid state storage market.

...

9 years
that changed the SSD market

"In October 2001 - the
number of SSD manufacturers listed on StorageSearch.com was 21
companies. Upto that point it had been growing at the cumulative rate of 1 new
SSD company each year.

In October 2010 - the number of SSD
manufacturers listed on StorageSearch.com passed 200 companies."

In
June 2012 - there are so many me-too SSD companies that it's not worth
listing them all. - I know directly of about 400. But in my
big picture
projection (published a few years ago) I estimated that the number of SSD
companies will pass 1,000 SSD companies before we see any significant market
consolidation.

I tell them - the
rankings are objective - not subjective. The series is based on analyzing the
search volume of millions of enterprise SSD readers who make the market happen.

It includes the key early adopters - which is why our lists picked up
successful companies like Fusion-io and SandForce years before the financial
data confirmed their importance in the market.

For more FAQs about this
series scroll to the bottom of this column.

.......

.

How to interpret these
rankings?

The most important thing is being
included in the list rather than the position within it.

As the number
of SSD oems has grown - since this series started - from 50 to over 300 - and
now SSD ISVs are another factor too - it's much harder than it used to be to
break into general awareness in the serious SSD market.

Our
brains haven't got any bigger.

The SSD market has become
really important
- and we have to filter in (and filter out) more SSD messages - to recognize
those which matter. (That includes me too - BTW - as the
editor.)

Despite
the importance of being in the top SSD companies list - there are many
companies - which have strong positions and narrow product lines in their own
application niche - which can survive and thrive without ever worrying about
being in it. It's only when those niches get large enough to impinge on others
that the visibility stakes matter. Let's not forget that the whole of the SSD
market was itself a tiny niche in the
dim distant
past.

I sometimes get emails from SSD product managers griping
about the validity of these lists.

My reply is that it's a
marketing reality they have to live with. Just as being ranked #1 or #91 on
Google could make a big difference to your company - being #1 or #99 with the
readers of StorageSearch.com makes a difference to your SSD business.
It's not me as the editor which makes the difference. It's our readers. SSD
vendors often tell me that our readers are the most significant new customers
they see. (And when it comes to financial matters and understanding the SSD
market too - our site is high up in the thinking of would-be investors, VCs,
market analysts, acquirers and go ahead vendors - as I know from my
discussions with readers.)

I also get asked by companies - what can
I do to get into the list and improve my rankings?

My reply is -

I'm just the messenger. I created the format - but I don't pick who's
in the list. I use the stats myself to tell me - who's important and who's not
- what's important and what's not?

Here's my advice for how to get better rankings...

Design
better SSDs. Improve your SSD marketing and spend more effort in
communicating with important SSD market segments. Improve the customer
experience of using your SSDs. Get your most enthusiastic customers to
spread the word about you by telling people they know that you are such a
great supplier.